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Stuff I left in the "unfinished posts" queue until now

This week has been ridiculously busy with work, and honestly it’s almost impossible to keep up with the firehose of crazy news in the Second Trump Era, so it’s as good a time as any to dust off the half-written scribblings I never got around to publishing.

Where have all the electric-car startups gone?

The Truth About Cars does a roll call of ambitious zero-emission vehicle companies which were launched with a flurry of hype as “the next Tesla,” raised enormous amounts of money, and crashed and burned without producing more than a handful of vehicles. (These days, it’s more like Tesla is “the next Nikola.”)

The phrase “Special Purpose Acquisition Company” comes up a lot.

Lordstown Motors was founded in 2018 by Steve Burns, former founder and CEO of AMP Electric Vehicles (which later became Workhorse). Named for the Lordstown Assembly plant previously owned by General Motors, the company was focused on delivering an all-electric pickup truck based off the Workhorse W-15 under a licensing agreement in exchange for $12 million and a 10-percent equity stake in Lordstown Motors.

In 2020, the company reverse merged with a special-purpose acquisition company named DiamondPeak Holdings and became listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. As with most SPAC deals, this yielded an incredibly high IPO. But the share price began to decline quickly and the company was criticized by the investment research firm Hindenburg Research — which accused Lordstown of fraud — just a year later.

Burns had already begun selling off shares and left the company in 2021 after several high profile vehicle fires and repeat announcements regarding production issues. That same year, Lordstown Motors announced a $230 million deal to sell the former GM plant to Foxconn Technology Group in exchange for the latter assembling its pickup. Foxconn would go on to sue Lordstown in 2023 for failing to follow through on investment promises and the company announced its bankruptcy shortly thereafter.

LAS Capital LLC bought Lordstown Motors' assets in September of 2023 for a stated $10 million. Its majority equity holder is Steve Burns, the same guy who sold off his shares for a tidy profit and left the company right before disaster struck. Lordstown has since been rebranded as “Nu Ride Inc.”

[…]

Nikola is another brand that, like Faraday Future, used the name of a famous scientist and didn't go bankrupt but seems like it’s dead in the water. Founded in 2014 by Trevor Milton, the brand wanted to build all-electric semi trucks before moving onto electrified pickup known as the Badger.

The Nikola Corporation announced its plans to merge with the SPAC VectoIQ Acquisition Corporation (run by former General Motors vice-chairman Stephen Girsky) in 2020. Shares quickly rose in value, with Nikola estimated to be worth over $13 billion just months after going public. But Nikola would be hit with a scathing report from Hindenburg Research accusing Milton of lying about the true number of vehicle registrations in order to sway investors.

NIkola’a CEO would resign shortly thereafter and General Motors would begin distancing itself from the business — as would other partners.

Its share price would plummet over the next several months and Milton would be incited for three counts of fraud by a United States federal grand jury in 2021. With stock prices now a shadow of what they were just a few years ago, Nikola has managed to deliver a few dozen all-electric vehicles and about 110 hydrogen-powered trucks. But this was not without incident, as the company has suffered from four major vehicle fires during testing.

Nikola has since filed for bankruptcy, no the surprise of nobody. If it’s any consolation to American electric-car startup fans, upstart Chinese manufacturers have been dropping like flies lately, too.

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